Page:The Moral and Religious Bearings of the Corn Law.djvu/21

21 V. The Corn Law question is one of peace, and this both at home and abroad.

I do not wish to excite unnecessary fear, but I believe, most solemnly, that if this law be not abolished, the consequences in relation to the internal quiet of our country will be awful. One of the first cries of the French Revolution was for bread, and there are many cries less likely than that to precede a national convulsion. There is great faith to be placed in the peaceable disposition of our countrymen. They have borne, and they do bear, with surprising patience, the grievances under which they labour. But the very spirit which makes them so calm and quiet is the very spirit which, when aroused and exasperated, is most destructive and desolating. It is not likely that a people will perish, and think their perdition is the fruit of wicked laws, without a struggle. If they imagine, rightly or not, that their miseries are unnecessary and unmerited, the probability is, that their patience will not last for ever, but that their indignation will burst forth in scenes too sad and sickening to contemplate. A people compelled to be idle and hungry must possess a temper unheard of yet if they lie calmly down and die. However we may deplore and condemn the employment of violence and brute force in the prosecution of any national object, whether a glorious or infamous revolution, the history of our country and the signs of our times warn us against concluding that its days are past. As, then, you value your country, and would preserve it from strife and anarchy, endeavour to remove unrighteous and oppressive laws.

Peace abroad is connected with our subject. It is true that the Corn Law is advocated on the ground that if we were dependent upon other nations for bread they might starve us. This is, indeed, to be deaf to all the lessons of history, to pour contempt on the conduct of commercial states in all times, to prefer certain misery to a most improbable and unlikely one, to starve ourselves, lest others starve us, and others,